What's the most disgusting thing you've ever put in your mouth? Never mind the kangaroo testicles and witchetty grubs pushed before jungle-strewn celebrities: earlier this year I met a man who has tasted a substance that seems to trigger the gag reflex in most people.

Willem van Eelen is an 86-year-old Dutchman who survived five years of near-starvation as a PoW in Japan to become the self-proclaimed "Godfather of In Vitro Meat". He now holds the patent to a food technology that repulses and excites people in equal measure. In his Amsterdam apartment he admitted to me, with a mischievous smile, that he once placed a small quantity of in vitro meat – muscle cells grown artificially, rather than in a living animal – in his mouth: "I once put a few cells on the tip of my tongue. I couldn't resist it. It tasted a little like chicken."

In vitro meat – also known as cultured or fake meat – is becoming a holy grail for anyone concerned about the environmental and ethical impacts of rearing millions of animals around the world each year for human consumption. Where today we use animals to turn grass into edible protein, in the future we might bypass this inefficient process and grow edible protein in an algae solution in factories instead. The animal rights group Peta has gone as far as offering a $1m prize to the first scientists to bring the meat to market.

In what is an encouraging breakthrough, a team of Dutch scientists, with Van Eelen as their figurehead, say they have now grown in vitro meat successfully for the first time in the laboratory.

When I visited Mark Post, one of the team's lead scientists, at his lab at the University of Technology in Eindhoven earlier this year, he showed me the plastic dishes in which the meat cells, originally taken from a pig foetus, were being grown. Inside was a pink liquid he described as having the texture of "an undercooked egg". It had yet to be "exercised" via electrical stimulation into a muscle-type texture. Not exactly a pork chop with herb butter, but I said I was willing to taste the future.

Alas, he declined. Wait a few years, he said, and he should have got to the stage where long strips of it can be grown and rolled up into frankfurter-like sausages. It will probably be 30 years before we see in vitro pork chops, or anything more sophisticated than the processed meat found in cheap burgers and sausages.

On paper, the science sounds compelling, but it will take a superhuman effort on the part of the world's advertising agencies to convince us to swallow it. After living through various food scares – many involving meat – you can understand the hesitancy. The scientists admit all this, saying they've even thought of alternative names for it. ("Krea", the Greek word for meat, was one of their favourite suggestions.)

But I for one don't see a problem with placing a forkful of the stuff in my mouth. OK, it's never going to be a gourmet experience, but as a substitute for real meat – one that could boast environmental and animal-welfare positives – it seems too good to leave off the menu. Bon appetit.